§ Oh Shaenon, why can’t I be you? The Patrick Swayze Manga Recommendation Guide.

03-2§ Robot 6 calls this post “The comic Chris Ware doesn’t want you to see“, and it is pretty hard to improve upon that description. What is the secret of…FLOYD FARLAND???

§ Geoff Boucher looks at Jack Kirby, the abandoned hero of Marvel’s grand Hollywood adventure:

The satisfaction was fleeting. The artist may be reverently referred to as “King” Kirby by the pop scholars and younger artists who celebrate his genre-defining work but Kirby is, in some ways, an overlooked figure in the broader view of American culture. He didn’t live to see his creations fly across the movie screen over the last decade and his four children made nothing from those lucrative films, although they are now pursuing legal action to claim some of the future Hollywood wealth. “There is,” daughter Lisa Kirby says, “a bittersweet legacy to my father’s work.”


§ Jog looks at Krusty’s Ergot.

§ Marc-Oliver continues his look at Steve Gerber and makes us think that OMEGA THE UNKNOWN was WATCHMEN before WATCHMEN was WATCHMEN.

§ Movie stuff! Steven Zeitchik points out that animated movies make lots of money these days and suggests it may have some consequences:

§ Remember when? Marc Sobel looks back at the 1999 SPX anthology and wonders where rea they now?

1. The Jay and Silent Bob cover by Matt Wagner is a reminder of just how big a deal Kevin Smith once was to comics fans, and how much that has changed in the subsequent decade. I don’t think most comics fans have had any real kind of emotional investment in Smith’s movies since Chasing Amy, and Smith’s few forays into writing comics have either been mired by ridiculous delays or simply underwhelming stories.

§ An oldie but a goodie we came across during surfing: 22 unflattering moments from autobiographical comics

3 COMMENTS

  1. Re the Kirby case: Marv Wolfman’s lawsuit against Marvel, in which he sought the rights to Blade and other characters he created, might be more relevant to any potential legal action by the estate than people think. That’s because ideas cannot be copyrighted, whether they’re ideas for characters or plots. As long as a writer takes the idea and modifies it sufficiently, in the context of the storytelling, to avoid plagiarism, there’s no basis for a legal complaint. Differences in origin, appearance, power, characterization, etc., — any change should suffice to make the character “new” in a legal sense. Genre fiction and the publication of formula fiction wouldn’t be feasible if writers and publishers could sue over the use of “core concepts” for characters.

    The TCJ interview with Wolfman on his case is interesting reading, if only because of the attitudes some pros, such as John Byrne and Jeff Rovin, had. The matter of Nova’s interpretation is noteworthy:

    DEAN: There, I guess, the judge’s response was that he felt the character was different in the version that was in Marvel comics from your original incarnation of the character?

    WOLFMAN: That’s what he felt. I disagreed with it because in my mind I would have just used a different name if I didn’t think they were connected. Yes, they were very different, but I believe that one was very much an adjunct of the other.

    DEAN: He seemed to make an effort to actually look at these comics characters and what distinguishes them.

    WOLFMAN: No, he read… I don’t know if he did or not, but he was going by Jeff Rovin’s paperwork to explain the difference. I disagreed with what Jeff had to say tremendously, including the fact that he said that in my fanzine Nova’s costume was black and white, whereas in the comic it was blue and yellow. Well, my fanzine was in black and white, so it couldn’t have been in color. And Len Wein, who created the Nova costume, always said that it was in blue and yellow. And he’s the one who in fact came up with the color design when we did it in the comic book. And he said, “That was the color that he had planned from the day that he came up with that costume.”

    DEAN: I believe Jeff was emphasizing that the origins were different?

    WOLFMAN: The origins were different, except for the fact that they were created by space aliens blasting the hero. The costumes were 95 percent similar, only minor differences. Nova in the fanzine had antennas, which looked silly to me. He had five stars and I simplified it to three, things like that.

    DEAN: The judge seemed to feel the difference between the skating capability and the flying capability was significant.

    How significant would a victory in court by the estate be if it only pertained to issues that Kirby had writing input on?

    SRS

  2. interesting selection from the autobio comics, but there are more, MANY more! ;)

    See the 2 True Porn, TPB collections for some more.

  3. That autobio comics thing was interesting. Though the fact so many of the pictures the stories rely on are either: A) Too small to read, or B) Not visible at all; killed it for me.

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